How can you utilise Google Analytics to optimise your website for SEO

Google Analytics isn’t just about monitoring and metrics. In fact, it’s one of the best free tools out there for informing content decisions that enable you to create high value content – and to rework and refresh old content so that it’s more in line with the interests and aims of your audience. There are a number of reports and insights in Google Analytics that will give you tools to upgrade content that needs optimising for SEO.

Optimise your analysis

Make sure you’re getting the data you need with a customised date range (six months is usually the optimum unless the content is younger) and use personas you’ve created to save an advanced segment. This will enable you to see what content appeals most to your established personas as opposed to new visitors.

Work with goals

Google Analytics goals have value beyond ecommerce – if you’re keen to optimise your content for SEO they can be incredibly useful too. For example, you might want to start tracking how many pages are being consumed per visitor session (e.g. more than three) or how long visitors are spending on a page (e.g. more than one minute).

Google Analytics Behaviour Reports

1. The Content Drilldown Report is one of four Site Content Reports that will show you how visitors are interacting with your content. There is a lot you can learn here in terms of how engaging it is and whether it’s contributing to your goals. You’ll be able to use it to identify:

• Your most popular content – which section gets the most pageviews and unique pageviews
• How long visitors spend on different sections of content
• Bounce rates for sections of content
• Your most popular posts – drill down to see metrics for individual pieces of content

All of these provide insight into where content is meeting your visitor’s requirements and where it’s not. Popular posts can reveal success in terms of topic choice, writing style, length of post, assets such as images, especially when compared to these aspects in posts that have not done so well.

2. The Landing Pages Report is another very useful Google Analytics tool for optimising content. If you’ve set goals, as described above, then you’ll easily be able to focus on the content that is performing well. Because this report also shows you how people arrive on your website it will also provide insight into the content that is performing best with your organic search audience.

3. Site Search Reports –  there are four different sections to this report and together they will give you a strong idea of what people are searching for on your site. From this you’ll be able to see what topics visitors to your site are most interested in – as well as those that you might not have covered but which your audience wants to see.

These are just a few of the ways in which the tools in Google Analytics can be used to provide insights to improve content performance. To find out more, get in touch with the Iconic Digital team today.